What Is Search Everywhere Optimization?
Hey there and welcome back. My name is Ryan Kelly, I’m your host, and today I’ve been asked to answer this direct question: what is search everywhere optimization?
Let me give you some context. Search engine optimization used to be about keywords and key phrases. Search everywhere optimization is about getting found or cited as the authoritative source on answer engines or artificial intelligence.
What does that mean? It means the act of coming up on Google, Yahoo, and Bing is being replaced with search everywhere optimization, which still includes search engines, but now also asks: how do you get cited in Google AI overviews? How do you get mentioned on ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and other third party answer engines?
Search everywhere optimization means leveraging reputation management on Google reviews, Yelp, and beyond, and making sure you’re getting great reviews that go beyond “I love this company, I highly recommend them.” Think more along the lines of: “Ryan Kelly and his team absolutely delivered on my marketing campaign to sell this product and get me found in this area. My business has grown. I highly recommend WSI for their AI optimization services.” Those are the phrases, the words, the sentences that help you become a trusted source.
So reputation management is one piece. We’ve also adapted content marketing. Whenever you’re writing content, whether for a service page, a blog, an article, a press release, or even short-form social media, you want to flex your E-E-A-T muscle: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. You want to talk about those things everywhere.
Social media is another piece. Gone are the days where social media was all about branding, culture, exposure, and acting as a sales closer. Those days are gone. Social media is now just as important for discoverability as it is for branding and marketing.
That means you need a solid social media strategy. You need to know what you’re talking about and when you’re talking about it. Rotating themes, predictability, great engagement, following up with your audience, engaging with other brands beyond just posting on your own page. Think about what kinds of questions people are asking AI and Google and how you want to be found, because social is now a huge part of that algorithm.
You want consistency in your messaging no matter where you’re writing it. You want great backlinks, great third party websites pointing back to you as the authoritative source. I’ll be covering that in an upcoming video: are backlinks dead, or are they still important, and how do you find the good ones?
Search everywhere optimization also includes the fundamentals of traditional SEO on your website. Is it fast? Are the links working? Do the images load? Is it full of good content? But search everywhere now goes beyond that to include social media, reputation management, strong content marketing, and digital PR, having well-crafted press releases that cite you as the source and syndicating them so that other media outlets pick them up and point back to your website.
Search engine optimization is dead. Search everywhere optimization is raging and alive. However, it also includes search engine optimization, and here’s why: when you’re doing great search everywhere optimization, writing good content regularly, and answering direct questions with clear answers across your website and social media, you are over time saturating your presence with more content. And that will still give you strong search engine optimization.
So there you go. Some context, some tactics, some tips on what search everywhere optimization is and why it’s where the world is headed. If you liked the video, click like, subscribe and follow for more. Until next time, buckle up and be safe.